Northwest Bank System Notification

On April 7, 2014, security researchers announced a recently-discovered vulnerability, named Heartbleed, within the widely used web encryption technology referred to as “OpenSSL.” By exploiting this vulnerability, attackers could access sensitive data, compromising the security of the server and its users.

Northwest Bank is aware of the Heartbleed Bug and has taken steps to evaluate our systems to ensure the safety of our customer’s information. The bank does not use the OpenSSL encryption and is not susceptible to the vulnerability.

Our websites are not affected because of the following:

The encryption on our Internet Banking does not use the OpenSSL library that is the source of the vulnerability.

We have never used this version of the OpenSSL library.

We have validated that our servers do not use the heartbeat extension.

Northwest Bank has strict security precautions in place to ensure the safety of our customer’s information and we will continue to monitor our websites closely.

To further protect your valuable information, we encourage you to change the passwords on any websites that are impacted by this vulnerability, if that website has already been patched. As a security practice, Northwest Bank also encourages customers to change their password regularly. Passwords can be changes by completing the following steps: